Right, so here’s where I’d like to push us to think beyond clause constituents and up to circumstantial meaning, which can be realised a cross a range of grammatical structures. For example:On the table (circumstance location place) there is a bookThe book on the table (Qualifier) is mineThe book is on the table (Participant in relational clause – not going to argue about which)How does one explain how this meaning can move around like this? By thinking of it as more than a clausal constituent.
H&M and JRM point to this in different places but Jing Hao I have a paper on this if anyone is interested.
It makes SO much more sense to think like this (sorry if that’s notional Jim) and helps students NOT make the errors of analysing beta enhancing clauses (eg when the book was on the table, I spilt my tea on it) and Qualifiers etc as Circumstances.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, Halliday does far more than merely "point" to this — it is his model. Circumstantiation constitutes one domain of manifestation of the transphenomenal fractal types of expansion and projection — transphenomenal because they operate across various categories of phenomena, and fractal because they are organising principles across different scales; see, for example, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 268).
That is, the meanings that are realised as circumstances are also realised across a range of other grammatical domains, as outlined by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 670-3), who exemplify this for 'cause' as follows:
[3] To be clear, these types of student errors reflect an inability to analyse formal constituency, since:
- mistaking a β clause for a circumstance is mistaking a clause for a prepositional phrase, and
- mistaking a Qualifier for a circumstance is mistaking a rankshifted prepositional phrase for a ranking one.
